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Dead Voters in South Carolina? Maybe. Maybe Not.

By Andrew Rosenthal January 12, 2012 3:09 pmJanuary 12, 2012 3:09 pm

Some readers have been calling my attention to a new report stating that the Department of Motor Vehicles in South Carolina found over 900 votes recorded in “recent elections” from dead people. These comments are intended, sometimes in a well-meaning way and sometimes not, to show me that what I’ve written about voter fraud and voter ID laws is wrong.

I have often said that there is no problem with voter fraud in this country. But Republicans pretend there is, and use this fantasy menace to disenfranchise certain groups, especially the elderly, minority voters and young people—i.e. Democrats—by imposing unnecessary and burdensome ID requirements to cast a ballot.

Let me be clear: I’m not saying that there have never been and never will be any case of voter fraud in American politics. But these cases do not remotely approach a scale that would justify efforts to systematically block access to the polls by many, many more voters.

The shocking news from the cemeteries of South Carolina doesn’t change my mind about that.
This is the story: South Carolina passed a voter ID law in 2011. The Justice Department has blocked implementation of that law, saying it will create an unconstitutional impediment to voting by certain groups.

That’s true, of course, but South Carolina officials wanted to fight the ruling, which is their right. So they set out to assemble data to bolster their case. One question was whether a significant number of eligible voters doesn’t have the government-issued photo ID required by the law. A comparison between voter rolls and state-issued drivers licenses or IDs revealed that nearly 250,000 people fell into that category. That number troubled some supporters of the ID law.

Kevin Schwedo, director of the Department of Motor Vehicles, looked at the data and said he found 37,295 cases in which the person was listed as dead. Of that number, he said, 957 voted in “recent elections.”

If 957 people went around pretending to be a dead person in order to cast a ballot, that’s fraud. But it’s a tiny problem–such a minute percentage of the state’s 2,495,000 registered voters that it’s not even worth calculating. It’s not in the same space-time-continuum as the potential disenfranchisement of tens of thousands of voters. And yes I know there was an 8 vote margin in the Iowa caucuses.

But we don’t know enough about Mr. Schwedo’s statement to even reach that conclusion. Mr. Schwedo testified in the state legislature the other day that he did not know how long a period the data covered – just that it was “recent elections.” So it could have been 957 people in the last election, or the last 10 elections.

And, to compound the problem, no one even knows if those people are actually dead, or if they’re just listed as dead in state records, which everyone seems to admit are in a terrible state. The solution here is better record keeping and regular purging of voter rolls.

Let me say it again: We don’t need to worry about zombie voters. We need to worry about government efforts to block participation in elections by members of minority groups. That problem has not gone away.